The border region between the United States and Mexico is growing so wildly that a new way must be found to govern it

TWO bullet holes decorate the driver's door of the car that has just pulled up: neat black craters with silver coronas of flaked-off paint. It is a chilling reminder that this is Tijuana, the host-city of Mexico's most powerful drug mob, where over 300 people were murdered in 1998, most of them in gangland shootouts. But the driver chuckles. “They're fake,” he says. So they are: the holes are solid metal, the “missing” paint artfully brushed on. Gallows humour, Tijuana-style.

An ability to laugh at things that scare their compatriots is not the only thing that distinguishes border-dwellers. The taxis are big American clunkers whose drivers listen to American radio stations. A shop sells bottles of American-made horchata, a traditional Mexican rice drink—but strawberry-flavoured, the way no traditional Mexican drinks it. Spanish melds with English: a government official asks his assistant to faxear a letter to someone. Lunch is at 1pm, not 2 or 3. Appointments are kept. Cars stop for pedestrians—sometimes.

Both Mexico and the United States find the border zone rather foreign. To Americans it is a quaint, impoverished land where everyone speaks Spanish; to Mexicans, a reckless place, haunted by drug traffickers and coyotes who promise migrants an easy crossing and leave them for dead in the desert. In return, border-dwellers on both sides often feel less close to their countrymen than to the people across the line. Many have family there, and perhaps a tenth cross over every day. There is border music (norteño bands that sing about bandits, and fusions of norteño with techno from the San Diego nightclubs), border art and even bilingual border films, of which this year's “Traffic” is merely the latest. Pairs of border cities are economically intertwined, sharing not only the same air and water but some of the same social ills. Thinking of the border as a separate country makes some kind of sense.

A strange country it would make, and not just because of its shape (see map). At the western end it is half-Anglo, at the other almost totally Hispanic. It is richer than Mexico, poorer than the United States, but booming. It has gone from being largely agricultural to mainly industrial in 30 years. In the past decade its population has swelled by 30%. GDP growth (for the border states on both sides) is averaging between 5% and 7 % a year. Yet despite its prosperity, it cannot provide electricity, roads, schools or housing fast enough, it is riddled with crime, and large parts of it risk running out of water in the next couple of decades. And nearly 400 people died last year trying to cross from one side of it to the other.

Of course, the border is not a single country. And that is its problem. It is a series of paired cities strung out across a vast tract of wilderness. These cities must go separately to their far-off federal governments in order to tackle joint local issues. And although they have things in common, the Mexican and American border regions are also very different. The side with the bigger changes, and the bigger dificulties, is the Mexican side.

Build it, and they will come

Forget, for a moment, the 300,000-odd Mexicans who enter the United States illegally each year. Forget, also, the ones who fail. It is a myth, studies have found, that they wind up living in one of the Mexican border boomtowns. After a few tries, they usually go home to their families. Instead, consider the many more—671,000 in 1997—who head north planning to stay on the Mexican side of the line, at least for a while. It is a growing tide. In 1990 around half of would-be migrants did not aim to cross the border; now 60% do not.

In a decade the population on the Mexican side has increased by nearly half, compared with one-fifth across the boundary

This flow will soon turn the border bottom-heavy. In a decade the population on the Mexican side has increased by nearly half, compared with one-fifth across the boundary. It has also become more bunched. Just 13% of the people live outside the ten biggest cities. At their current rates, Tijuana will double in size in 12 years, Ciudad Juarez in 15 or 16.

They come, single men and women or entire families, from big cities or tiny villages the length and breadth of Mexico, to work; above all, to work in the maquiladoras, the factories that make products from duty-free imported parts for re-export, mostly to the United States. The maquiladoras were devised in 1965 as an alternative to the bracero programme, then just ended, that allowed a number of migrant Mexican farm-workers into the United States. They were meant to reduce migration, but instead they redirected it. Since then the export boom set off by the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which took effect in 1994, has swelled it. Border-state maquiladoras now employ over 1m people, an increase of 150% since 1990.

Real wages on the Mexican side of the border have dropped overall since 1995

Horror stories are told about the maquiladoras. In fact, many have improved their working conditions in recent years and given employees more benefits. Yet according to a study by Jorge Santibañez and Rodolfo Cruz at the College of the Northern Border (Colef) in Tijuana, real wages on the Mexican side of the border have dropped overall since 1995, when the peso was devalued, while on the other side they have risen. On average, an American border worker makes three to four times what a Mexican does, up from 2.5 times in 1990. In certain jobs, it can be 12 times as much. Moreover, although a new “third generation” of maquiladoras—factories that do design as well as assembly—employs more highly-skilled workers, another Colef study has found that they are not, on the whole, getting higher wages.

This suggests that wages were not only hammered after Mexico's 1995 economic crisis, but continue to be squeezed to compete with Asian countries. Yung Kwon, the former president of Samsung Electromechanics of America, who oversaw its plants in Tijuana, says that productivity is lower in Mexico than, say, China or Thailand, and that Asian companies come to Mexico only because the United States market is close by. When that market falters, so do they. Since the slowdown began in the United States, nearly half the Mexican jobs lost have been in the maquiladoras. Another incentive, the duty-free import regime, was due to expire at the end of last year, but the government has conceded breathing-spaces of up to a year, worried that the end of privileges will drive the factories away altogether.

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“The maquiladoras will not grow again at the rates seen in the 1990s,” predicts Mr Cruz. To some, this is welcome. Maquiladoras are criticised not just for exploiting labour and producing toxic waste, but also for contributing little to the wider economy. Over 97% of their supplies come from outside Mexico. Since they are often foreign-owned, and are bent on shipping products out as cheaply as possible, they have historically had little or no interest in developing infrastructure, local skills or education, says Charles Nathanson of the San Diego Dialogue, a think-tank on regional development. Their unplanned, parasitic boom has made the border what it is today.

Streetlamps in the desert

The colonias of Ciudad Juarez stretch for miles into the roasting, yellowish plains of the Chihuahuan desert. The farther away from the city, the bumpier the dirt roads, the more ramshackle the houses, the bigger the piles of rubbish. Suddenly, just beyond the last and most tumbledown colonia of all, there is a bizarre sight: a neat forest of streetlamps in the middle of the desert, patiently awaiting streets and houses to illuminate.

The streetlamps are the city's attempt to reverse the normal order of things. Most of the colonias began as illegal settlements thrown up by migrant workers, who then petition or fight local councils to get services. The fights are long. Alejandro Perez of the Study Centre and Labour Workshop, a local labour-rights organisation, lives in a district that was founded 35 years ago with the first maquiladoras, but has had running water only for the past decade. Usually, residents must share the cost of roads, electricity lines or piping. “And yet,” notes Mr Perez wryly, “the city is full of great big avenues so we can all get to work on time.”

Everyone agrees the biggest concern is water

The biggest concern, everyone agrees, is water. The border region depends on two rivers: the Rio Bravo (Rio Grande), running down from the Rocky mountains, along the border and into the Gulf of Mexico, and the Colorado river, which follows the boundary between California and Arizona down into Mexico before spilling into the Gulf of California. A binational treaty says how much of their water each country can use, but the supply is running short, exacerbated by several years of drought in the centre of the region. The Rio Bravo is so weak that it dries up just short of the beach near Brownsville. In some towns, only half the population has running water and slightly more are connected to the main sewer.

There are underground aquifers, but they are not in the treaty, so cities on both sides tend to overuse them, turning them salty. The aquifer under Ciudad Juarez-El Paso will run out within the next 25 years, and both cities are looking at either desalination plants or new aquifers. Either will be expensive.

Services are overstretched in the American border cities too. But several things make life more difficult for the Mexican ones. Almost all their money still comes from federal or state government. How much they get depends on their populations, which are hard to count because so many people are just passing through. The United States' clamp-down on illegal immigrants, and the corresponding increases in the prices charged by coyotes—from $300 or so in the early 1990s to as much as $2,000 today—have not discouraged any from trying, but merely forced them to hang around longer in the border towns.

The official population figures are routinely inflated to try to win more resources; last year's census is already being decried as an undercount. Worse, a lot of people work across the border, paying taxes in America but using services in Mexico. Some 80,000 Tijuanans commute across the line every day. Worst of all, the law forbids Mexican cities to get into debt.

One place they can turn to for more resources is the Border Environment Co-operation Commission (BECC) and its associated North American Development Bank. These were created, along with NAFTA, to help pay for water, sewerage and better waste treatment on both sides of the line. So far the bank has authorised $276m for $870m-worth of projects.

But, says Franco Bareno at the BECC, it would cost $2 billion-3 billion just to get all the Mexican border towns equipped with basic water and sewerage services. To bring all their essential infrastructure up to scratch, estimates Ernesto Ruffo, Mexico's border commissioner—a post created seven months ago by President Vicente Fox—would require an immediate $18 billion, or 3% of Mexico's GDP.

Toxic waste is yet another matter. Now that the maquiladoras' duty-free regime is ending, their waste will have to stay in Mexico instead of being returned abroad. Mexico has only one fully-equipped refinery for industrial toxic waste, and according to one government estimate, a mere 7.5% of the stuff produced in Mexico is properly registered. Treatment plants are thus a big business opportunity. But there is also the risk, say environmentalists, that a lot more maquiladoras will simply start dropping their leftovers in city dumps.

The border's explosive growth also brings social problems. New arrivals come without the extended families and social fabric that held their villages together. Ciudad Juarez, for instance, has ten day-care centres, each catering for a few hundred children, although 180,000 women work in the factories. Traditional roles are shaken up. “The men undergo a huge change when their wives start working. They lose their role as the provider, and that frustrates them,” says Esther Chavez, whose Casa Amiga women's centre in Ciudad Juarez deals with more and more domestic violence.

Crime, much of it related to drug trafficking, is high, and the justice system is overburdened

Crime, much of it related to drug trafficking, is high, and the justice system is overburdened. Ms Chavez compares the number of murders in the city—183 last year, less than half resulting in even a prosecution—with that of El Paso across the way: nine murders, all solved.

Drug-taking, though much less common than in the United States, is also particularly high on the border. The proportion of people who have tried drugs in Tijuana is nearly triple Mexico's national average, according to Gady Zabicky at the National Psychiatry Institute. At the Centre for Mental Health in Mexicali, over half of last year's patients had mental problems caused by drugs, up from 15% in 1999.

The big incentive to try drugs is their cheapness and availability on the border. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mexican drug lords faced with cash-flow problems started paying their couriers in kind, flooding the borderlands with cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. The doctors in Mexicali say a dose of crystal meth costs as little as 20 pesos ($2.20), and a shot of heroin 50 pesos.

Despite all this, most of the people who come to the colonias, enduring the two-hour bus rides to work and cobbling together a dwelling out of spare and stolen materials, will say that they are better off than where they came from. The grimness is not unmitigated. Themaquiladoras, in particular, are becoming more socially and environmentally aware. Some pitch in with the government to build cheap housing and help workers pay for it with financing schemes—essential, since credit is scarce in Mexico. And as small-scale Mexican agriculture disintegrates, partly because of competition under NAFTA from huge American farms, millions are finding a precarious urban life better than a rural one with no money at all.

Not everywhere is overrun by maquiladoras. On the whole, they have taken hold where a local industry, such as agriculture, is flagging. Mexicali, for example, used to be a farming town, and many residents still cross the line to work in the lush Imperial Valley, north of Calexico. But now the factories are feeding its growth; in turn, says Jose Maria Ramos at the Mexicali branch of the Colef, the city feeds 80% of Calexico's services and commerce.

On the other hand, take Nuevo Laredo. Along with Laredo, its cousin in Texas, it has long been the busiest crossing point for trucks, with all the associated services they require (and congestion and pollution too). Or Piedras Negras, a town founded on mining and electricity generation. Both towns offered better-paid, more stable jobs than the maquiladoras could, so they have grown more organically; they have fewer factories, and fewer people without running water and sewerage.

But in every case, national issues can have sharp local effects. Because of their economic links, a slowdown in the United States will hit both Mexicali and Calexico hard. Nuevo Laredo has done well partly because Mexican truckers have not, up to now, been allowed to drive far into the United States, so they have to stop in the town to transfer their loads to an American rig. A NAFTA tribunal recently ruled to end the ban on Mexican drivers; when that comes into force and the truckers can drive straight through, a lot of the town's business may dry up.

One head is better than two

Pairs of border cities sometimes try to collaborate rather than going through the bureaucracy of Washington or Mexico city. But this is usually to solve small problems rather than to plan long-term. Even then, the international boundary can get in the way. El Paso's firemen once responded to an emergency in Ciudad Juarez, only to realise that their life insurance did not cover them across the border.

Decisions on public projects are often made by diplomats thousand of miles away

There are also countless groups for cross-border co-operation, from official bodies such as the BECC to business associations, governors' meetings, academic societies and cultural and environmental organisations. But, like the city councils, they are hogtied. Big decisions on public projects must be made, often by diplomats, a thousand miles away.

It is a shame, for a poor and a rich country side by side have some great opportunities for collaboration. For example, Tijuana and San Diego both need new aqueducts to bring water from the east. “They should build one together on Mexican land, with Mexican labour and American financing,” says Mr Nathanson of the San Diego Dialogue. “But the politics makes it very complicated.”

By creating a border commissioner, Mr Fox has recognised that the border needs special attention. Mr Ruffo has ideas for how to win financing, create yet more bi-national bodies (such as an independent water authority) and lay the groundwork for regional planning. But he has no executive power. He can only listen to the local politicians and in turn try to bend the ears of federal ones, to wheedle some extra money here, another road there. And although Mr Fox has promised more decentralisation, neither country has floated ideas for how to make it easier for cross-border cities to work together. If all that vibrant cultural mixing is to be turned into something prosperous and substantial, this is what must happen next.